Announcing Upbound Cloud Community Preview!
May 24, 2020
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We’re excited to announce the Upbound Cloud Community Preview as the fastest way to get started with the open source Crossplane project using free, time-limited environments for early evaluation! Upbound quickly gives you an enterprise control plane that layers on top of your existing infrastructure and cloud services, giving you all the tools you need to build your own internal cloud platform—the same way industry leaders build theirs. Upbound and Crossplane make it easy to define, compose and publish your own infrastructure APIs that encapsulate policy guardrails, and add your automation, so it’s easy for teams to consume the infrastructure they need, conform to best-practices and policies, and deliver applications faster.
The path of cloud native apps from developer laptop into production requires collaboration across teams to build the app itself, deploy and manage the app and it’s infrastructure, and provide cloud infrastructure that complies with organizational policies and best-practices.
Today: Disjointed infrastructure management
Today, legacy IaC and scripting tools must be glued together in deployment pipelines that are often fragile and error prone. It’s difficult for team members to collaborate without a clear separation of concerns between infrastructure and applications, so they can contribute what they know best as part of a larger organization.
Disjointed tooling makes it impossible to ensure that infrastructure best-practices and controls are observed, often resulting in delayed application delivery due to release reviews and approvals that can drag out for weeks or months.
With tens or hundreds of apps in production using separate toolchains and a mix of cloud platforms, it can be almost impossible to get a complete picture of what’s running where and if they’re compliant with policies and best-practices.
Upbound Cloud: run your enterprise control plane
Upbound Cloud quickly gives you an enterprise control plane to power your internal cloud platform. It layers on top of your existing cloud and data center environments, tooling, and processes empowering you to end IaC toolchain sprawl, unify application and infrastructure management across clouds and data centers, and create infrastructure abstractions for applications to safely consume.
Upbound’s enterprise control plane provides a single source of truth to configure and deploy applications with the infrastructure they need from the same repositories and pipelines, no matter where they run.
This enhances team collaboration as applications can easily consume your custom infrastructure APIs, with policy guardrails, from any tool that works with the Kubernetes API including kubectl, GitOps, and more.
All the tools you need for your internal cloud platform
Upbound Cloud provides all the tools you need for your internal cloud platform, making it easy to deploy an enterprise control plane that uses the open source Crossplane project to provision and manage the infrastructure and services your applications need directly from kubectl.
Single pane of glass into environments, clouds, and data centers
Upbound Cloud provides a single pane of glass to view all your infrastructure environments, monitor application health, and apply policies across clouds and data centers. Upbound provides a single source of truth so you can configure and deploy applications and the infrastructure they need from the same repositories and pipelines no matter where they run.
Fully-managed Crossplane with a click of a button
Anyone can use our open source Crossplane project to power their internal cloud platform, but hosting it yourself can be a distraction. Upbound takes care of all the backups, management, and security so you can focus on what matters most.
With Upbound Cloud, you can provision a fully-managed Crossplane instance with the click of a button by creating an Upbound Cloud Environment, like dev, staging, or prod.
Each Environment provides a dedicated Crossplane instance that can be configured with your custom infrastructure APIs. Applications can then easily consume the infrastructure they require when they’re deployed into that Environment.
Crossplane Providers from the Upbound Registry can be installed into an Environment to add cloud provider primitives to your enterprise control plane.
Discover the resources and services you need in the Registry
The Upbound Registry is the free community library for all things Crossplane. Discover and publish the infrastructure providers, stacks, and applications you need to build your own internal cloud platform.
The Upbound Registry makes it easy to discover, install, and publish resources for Crossplane that can be consumed directly or composed into your own abstractions for teams to use.
Providersare installed into an Environment to add cloud provider primitives to your control plane. Any infrastructure or managed service is exposed as an API with Crossplane CRDs and controllers, making it easy to use your existing infrastructure and cloud services.Stacksare one way to publish infrastructure abstractions to your internal API, so applications can easily consume them. Infrastructure abstractions can also be directly published to an Environment using kubectl or GitOps workflows.Applicationsare installed and configured inWorkspaces, and they can consume the infrastructure they need through your custom APIs in each Environment. Application configurations can also be directly applied to a Workspace using kubectl or GitOps workflows.
Custom registry packages can be published to your private Repositories, so they’re only available to your team, or publicly listed in the Registry to share your creation with the whole world.
Layer on top of your existing infrastructure
Building an internal cloud platform with legacy scripting and IaC tools is risky and time consuming, often resulting in deployment pipelines that are fragile, error prone, and don’t adhere to infrastructure best-practices and policies.
Upbound Cloud layers on top of your existing tools, processes and infrastructure with an enterprise control plane that transforms existing infrastructure into an internal cloud platform.
With a Crossplane Provider installed into your Environment you can define and publish your own infrastructure abstractions, with policy guardrails, as custom infrastructure APIs on top of your existing infrastructure.
Applications can then consume your custom infrastructure APIs, with their tools of choice, to easily provision and manage the infrastructure they need while ensuring organizational policies and best-practices are followed, without slowing the pace of application delivery.
Robot accounts support deploying from CI/CD pipelines and GitOps workflows.
Collaborate with the whole team
Teams are often bogged down by slow approvals and uncertain compliance requirements which prevent them from building applications quickly.
Upbound Cloud lets you publish infrastructure abstractions which include guardrails written as code that application teams can consume, streamlining team collaboration and making it easier for everyone to do the right thing using vetted and pre-approved infrastructure APIs, without slowing the pace of application delivery.
Application operators can build, run, and publish Applications in Workspaces that can easily consume the infrastructure they need from the published infrastructure APIs in an Environment.
In addition to personal accounts, Upbound supports Organizations which include users, teams and robot accounts:
Userswhich can be owners or members of the Organization.Robotsfor use in CI/CD pipelines and GitOps workflows.Teamsthat can be structured however you like, with role-based access control across Environments, Workspaces and Repositories.
With Upbound Cloud you can access everything through the GUI or via the CLI using kubectl, deployment pipelines, or anything that works with the Kubernetes API including GitOps workflows.
Get Started Today!
Try Upbound Cloud Community Preview using free, time-limited environments for early evaluation, checkout the docs, and watch the video below for a guided tour!